14 DAY TRIAL // We've been reporting over the weekend on Crytek's bankruptcy rumors, but the video game developer denied all allegations regarding its financial status.
Crytek's official statement issued earlier today was pretty clear in denying all the rumors on its inability to pay its staff on time.
“Regardless of what some media are reporting, mostly based on a recent article published by GameStar, the information in those reports and in the Gamestar article itself are rumours which Crytek deny.
We continue to focus on the development and publishing of our upcoming titles Homefront: The Revolution, Hunt: Horrors of the Gilded Age, Arena of Fate, and Warface, as well as providing ongoing support for our CryEngine and its licensees.
We have received a lot of positive feedback during and after E3 from both gaming press and gamers, and would like to thank our loyal employees, fans and business partners for their continuous support.”
However, it looks like Kotaku was able to talk with 10 current and ex-Crytek employees on the matter and from their point of view, the situation described over the weekend by German magazine Gamestar is perfectly accurate.
In fact, there is more to the matter that the news that appeared a few days ago didn't cover and it is not good news, unfortunately.
According to one of Crytek's current employees, about 100 people from key positions have already left the studio since March. They were not laid off, but due to Crytek's new approach on development strategy, they have decided to look for other challenges.
Crytek's CEO Cevat Yerli announced last year that his studio would start developing free-to-play games, which would gradually become its focus.
“Instead of focusing on the core strengths of the company, which would be the engine and innovative PC titles, we simply jumped at every next big thing in the industry. Except that each time we did, it was a little too late and we were running after our competitors. There's no sense of identity at this point and I think that frustrates both employees and fans,” said a Crytek employee.
The result of the new development strategy is called Warface, which is a flop in all the countries where it made its debut, with one exception – Russia. Obviously, this is not enough to issue payment checks for around 800 people.
To make things even worse, Microsoft has decided to cancel work on Ryse: Son of Rome sequel. The reasons are unknown, but rumor has it that there was a conflict over who would be the owner of the franchise if a sequel were released.
After the cancellation of Ryse's sequel, Crytek's partnership with Microsoft ended, so the Redmond company would no longer send checks to the studio.
As an independent video game developer, Crytek's income comes from big publishers like Microsoft and EA, but now, without a major publisher behind, things are starting to become serious.
“Suddenly the direction everyone saw us go in was not that clear anymore. It was obvious that we didn't have any big time publishers at our back to finance our development. A lot of people started to get frustrated then (and started to look for other work), as the strategy was not clear to the employees,” said another Crytek employee.
Lots of Crytek employees have confirmed that they haven't been fully paid and that most of the time, they receive their checks very late. Some say that they haven't been paid at all for one or two months.
We've already seen Crytek's official answer to the claims described above, so we doubt that the company's leaders will come out with an entirely different message in the coming days, but we can hope that the studio will finally receive the “cash injection” that Cevat Yerli spoke of earlier this month.